Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Ale Contenti

GoingNative 15: VC++ turns 20, Ale turns 40, C9 turns 9

Charles — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:01:29 GMT

Visual C++ turned 20 this month! It certainly has come a long way. How did it begin? What were the goals way back when? Fortunately for us, one of the original team members VC++ team members, Jan Gray, set up a reunion of former and current employees who worked on the first visual IDE for C++ from Microsoft. During one of the related gatherings, Jan and fellow original VC++ alum, Rico Mariani, joined us for a casual chat about the early days of VC++. This conversation is full of goodness and a few surprises. Congratulations to the VC++ team and to all who shaped and continue to shape the product, from VC++ 1.0 to VC++11 - and that includes you, too!

It's no coincidence that as VC++ turned 20, Ale turned 40, and Channel 9 turned 9. Or is it? What's the hidden meaning in the sequence 20 40 9? Certainly something special! Happy birthday to all!!! And a big thank you to all of you who use Visual C++.

[00:00] GoingNative(); //We filmed this episode on Ale's 40th, VC++'s 20th, and C9's 9th birthday!!
[02:26] Rico Mariani and Jan Gray reminisce about the very early days of VC++
[46:11] ~GoingNative();

GoingNative 10: Welcome Ale Contenti, VC11 and Beyond with Steve Teixeira and Tarek Madkour

Charles — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 18:57:23 GMT

Visual Studio 2012 RTM'd recently and MSDN subscribers are now writing code in the latest iteration of VS! C++ developers will be pleased with the improvements in VC11. From the compiler to libraries to IDE features, VC++ in VS 2012 represents the best version of VC++ to date, chalk full of new features and modern capabilities.

Now that VC11 has shipped, what's next? What are some of the things the VC team are working on? What's the plan for shipping new features faster?

[00:00] GoingNative(); // VC++ Dev Manager Ale Contenti joins the cast!

[07:09] Charles interviews VC++ leaders Steve Teixeira and Tarek Madkour about VC11 RTM and beyond. Congratulations to the VC team for shipping a stellar release!!

[38:04] ~GoingNative(); // Ale and Charles talk about the industry's movement towards more cohesive standard modern libraries. See you next month! Go native! Ciao Ale!

David LeBlanc: Inside SafeInt

Charles — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:34:00 GMT

SafeInt is a C++ header containing the SafeInt class, non-throwing functions to check common operations, and the associated internal mechanisms. SafeInt is currently used extensively throughout Microsoft, with substantial adoption within Office and Windows.

David LeBlanc is a software engineer and security expert. You may know him from the Writing Secure Code books. David and Michael Howard have helped raise the bar for software security inside Microsoft for several years now. David has mostly remained out of the limelight since he's much more interested in writing secure code than talking about writing secure code. Well, now David's going to be famous. Sorry, David.

The great Ale Contenti joins us in this conversation to provide some context and ask some hard questions. Ale is a dev lead on the C++ libraries team. You've seen him a few times on 9. As you can imagine, he probably uses SafeInt in his own work.

Here, we dig into the thinking behind SafeInt, how it works, how it's composed, when to use it, when not to use it and how it will evolve to meet new demands and support other compilers (SafeInt now supports gcc). Enjoy!

Ale Contenti and Louis Lafreniere: Understanding Exceptions and When/How to Handle Them

Charles — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:47:00 GMT

Sometimes, things go wrong when code executes. You can't predict when this will happen or even why, but you can write code to handle exceptional problems. If you're lucky, the problem will carry with it a bunch of useful information that you can use, at runtime, to handle the specific error. These exceptional information structures are called structured exceptions; blobs of bad news carrying useful and specific information that you can use to find your way out of the exceptional rabbit hole. Of course, with useful data packaged up in an exception you can more easily debug to find root causes, which is much harder to do with, say, error codes...

What is a structured exception, exactly? How should you handle exceptions that you don't assume will arise during the execution of your code? What are the correct patterns of exception handling that you can safely rely on? What does the C++ compiler have to do with exception code patterns?

Come along for ride into the deep and murky world of exceptions with some folks that truly understand them at the most fundamental levels.

Ale Contenti is a senior development lead in the C++ base class libraries team. Louis Lafreniere is a principal software developer in the C++ compiler group. Here, Ale and Louis teach us about exceptions and handling them (and when not to handle them). I love talking to the VC++ People. They live on the metal and really understand the fascinating intracacies of our platform.

Enjoy this latest Going Deep episode.

Ale Contenti: VC++ Safe Libraries and More

Charles — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:23:00 GMT

Ale Contenti is a Senior Development Lead on the VC++ team. He works primarily on Safe Libraries and associated constructs. Here, we learn about what's new in VC SL (checked iterators are certainly cool - and fast too), things to think about in terms of writing "safe" C++, future thinking in this area, and how to write a useful and performant C++ program without using pointers explicitly.

VC++ continues to evolve...

Enjoy.